Cloud Computing

Nowadays Cloud Computing infrastructures are being challenged by an increasing demand for evolved cloud services characterised by heterogeneous performance requirements including real-time, data-intensive and highly dynamic workloads. The classical way to deal with dynamicity is to scale computing and network resources horizontally. However, these techniques can be way more effective when coupled with mechanisms ensuring efficient and predictable execution of software components in distributed, shared & multi-tenant infrastructures. Such mechanisms may span across the multitude of layers or planes characterizing a cloud infrastructure: from ensuring temporal isolation at the OS kernel and/or hypervisor level, to intelligent, QoS-aware mechanisms for VM placement and migration, to preventing unstable networking performance by avoiding cross-talks and resources saturation, through an appropriate QoS-aware management of the network and applications' flows.
The RETIS started contributing with applied research in this area in the context of the IRMOS European Project, collaborating with prestigious other academic & industrial institutions in Europe, such as the High-Performance Computing Center of Stuttgart, the National Technical University of Athens, Bell Labs and Telefonica I+D.
As an example, the RETIS provided the IRMOS real-time scheduler, a scheduler guaranteeing CPU time to, and performance isolation among, co-hosted VMs on a system.